Natures wonders: bees love flowers with fungi (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, December 06, 2024, 20:44 (93 days ago) @ David Turell

Makes larger flowers:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2459008-plants-laced-with-a-variety-of-fungi-are-m...

"Plants treated with diverse species of fungi that live on roots grew larger flowers, prompting bees to visit them more often and spend more time there.

“'[These fungi] might not only have benefits for the plant itself, or for the soil, but also for the pollinators,” says Aidee Guzman at Stanford University in California.

"Guzman and her colleagues grew squash plants (Cucurbita pepo) inoculated with four combinations of different species of mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi live on roots, giving the plant nutrients scavenged from the soil in exchange for carbon.

"Once the plants flowered, the researchers moved them from a greenhouse to an outdoor field. They then followed bees around the field for a week, counting their visits to each plant and how long they spent on them.

"Plants inoculated with fungi received an average of 28 per cent more bee visits than plants that hadn’t been treated. The bees also spent 47 per cent more time on their flowers.

An increase in the treated plants’ flower size was the only trait clearly associated with more bee visits, the researchers found. Given that plants and mycorrhizal fungi have evolved together for hundreds of millions of years, it makes sense that the fungi could prompt the plants to grow larger flowers that are better at attracting pollinators. “It’s no surprise that their role goes beyond plant growth,” says Guzman.

"Not every fungal treatment worked in the same way, though. The plants inoculated with the most diverse group of fungi saw the most bee visits, but other combinations had different effects. Some prompted the plant to divert nutrients away from flowers to their roots, resulting in fewer bee visits. Other treated plants grew more flowers and produced more nutritious pollen, but these changes weren’t linked to more bee visits.

“"It’s nice to see that they found this variability among different types of fungi,” says Jon Bennett at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. That there can be a trade-off between a plant attracting pollinators and supporting fungi suggests these two different symbiotic relationships could have influenced one another’s evolution, he says."

Comment: an ecosystem that produces this type of result shows the value of such systems. That bees can respond to differentials in flowers is not surprising.